I've started using DreamHost as more than just a place to backup my photos. I have to say it isn't going that smoothly.

On their support wiki they say that they aim to keep load averages below 3. This just doesn't appear to be true. The web server that I have been on regularly has load averages over 20 (seen it much higher than that as well), very rarely does it drop below 5. The result of this is that my Wordpress pages can often take 10-15 seconds to process, even with wp-cache turned on.

When I raised this with support they told me that the load on the server wasn't an issue. They ignore any comment I make that maybe they should update their "below 3" claim on the wiki.

This morning I had another big problem. All of a sudden all my websites had stopped working.

After a bit of digging I realised what had happened. They had moved me from one web server to another without warning. I host the DNS for my domains, so my websites were all pointed at the IP address of the server I was on before.

There was no warning (or even notification after the event) of this move. The support people I am talking to don't seem to see that this is a big problem.

So now I have to go an update the DNS for all my domains and change all my rsync backup scripts to point to the new server (and setup my ssh keys again).